For months, concerned Americans have voiced their opposition to President Obama’s ill-conceived approach to closing the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I believe his desire to close the facility is based more on politics than policy and we have learned throughout our history that United States security should not include a political calculation or it places our citizens at risk.
Five days before the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner, the White House confirmed that six detainees at Guantanamo had been returned to their homeland in the nation of Yemen. As details of the plot come to light, Americans are quickly becoming familiar with a nation that is in peril and could be, as Senator Joseph Lieberman has said, the “next war” we face in the global war on terror.
Today, not one of the men who bombed the USS Cole in 2000 that were detained and tried in Yemen remains in custody. Every one of them has been released by a weak and ineffective Yemeni government to continue their war on the United States.
The policy error of returning detainees to a nation with a history of setting terrorists free to return to battle stands as a stark example of the consequences of basing critical national security decisions on politics.
Put aside, for a moment, the laughable claim by the Homeland Security Secretary that the “system worked” in the Detroit bomb plot or the fact that it took President Obama 72 hours to speak to the nation about the incident and consider the larger consequences of an administration that does not take the issue of security seriously. When we finally did hear from the president, he told us this is an isolated extremist; an assertion that already seems incorrect. We often hear politicians say we have to get it right 100% of the time while terrorists only have to win once. This is true and it should be the guiding principle of our national security policy.
Three days before the attempted bombing, Andrew McCarthy writing in National Review asked, “Does [the] Justice [Department] not appreciate not only how perilous but how unseemly it appears under the circumstances for it to be leading the charge to release the Yemeni detainees? And could anyone really believe that the supposedly noxious symbolism of Gitmo is more dangerous to Americans than is deporting terrorists to the places where terrorism thrives?”
Bringing radical terrorists to the United States and giving them access to American courts with due process, as is happening with the Flight 253 suspect, is a mistake. Sending them to nations that cannot or will not hold them may be an acceptable risk to this administration, but it should not be an acceptable policy to the American people.
